Destiny

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This week for Video Game Tuesday I’m back with a topic that is about how being super serious isn’t always entertaining. It’s about how Playing to Win isn’t Always Fun!

What do you mean “Playing to Win”: Well I mean that pretty literally, sometimes it’s just more fun to just goof off in games, and in fact some games don’t have set objectives and are made purely for goofing off in.

Like what?: Well Minecraft for one is a perfect example of a game that’s made purely to goof off in, you can create amazing things in the game including working calculators, but it’s really mostly used to just goof off and make stuff. There’s a reason why Rooster Teeth has a weekly episode of their Let’s Play crew just playing Minecraft. It’s got pretty much endless potential to just mess around with friends.

What do you like?: I personally keep Grand Theft Auto V always installed on my PS4 just to load up on days where I’m stressed to just goof off online. I go around creating havoc and just having a blast destroying other players. Sure it’s not always a nice thing to do, and I tend to do it to people who aren’t doing special activities like the Motorcycle Club stuff, but just going around and goofing off is pretty fun.

So what about playing to win?: Well I tend to avoid the PvP aspects of games because I personally don’t find them much fun as people take it way too seriously sometimes. League of Legends is a pretty great example of people getting way too invested in pick up games. Now I’d understand if they were playing in ranked mode, but if they are just playing casually I’m not expecting someone to be perfect. PvE activities for me tend to be more fun as it involves either the plot, or just good old team work oriented gameplay with other players.

That’s it for this week’s Video Game Tuesday. What are some of your favorite games to just mess around in? Leave your answers in the comments below!

My concerns: We don’t have confirmation that the three subclasses added in The Taken King are going to be coming to Destiny 2. We have others like the Voidwalker, Gunslinger and Striker that were in the vanilla game, and the “new” subclasses. However they aren’t really new, because they are almost exactly the same as the ones that are being replaced with the exception of their Supers. I can understand that the Defender Titan and especially Sunsinger Warlock supers were overpowered, and lead to things like people soloing Raid Bosses. I can get why they were removed, it’s a balancing nightmare and frankly overpowered in the case of Sunsinger. In addition I was hoping to see Bungie embrace the fact that PvP (Crucible) is a vastly different experience from the main game. But instead of fixing the issue for just PvP, it seems they’ve also screwed over every PvE player as well. Bladedancer’s removal is odd.

They have completely changed the Primary, Secondary, and Heavy Weapon systems. They are now Kinetic, which is just standard guns and contains the primary weapons from Destiny 1 plus a couple others like the sidearm pistols and the new SMGs. The Energy weapons replace the Secondary, and are exactly the same as the Kinetic, except that they deal elemental damage as well. Finally the Power category which contains every Secondary, minus the sidearms, and the Heavy Weapons. No longer is it possible to equip both a Sniper Rifle and Rocket launcher. I understand why this would have been an excellent change for PvP, and in fact is quite brilliant and would solve a lot of the balance issues faced in the first game. However the gameplay in the first strike showed me that while the weapon systems have changed for PvE players, the enemies behavior and mass numbers haven’t. A lot of strategies in Destiny 1 revolved around taking out enemies from as far away as possible with a sniper rifle and rocket launcher any that got too close in groups. The enemies haven’t changed since Destiny 1, and you certainly aren’t getting your new class abilities recharged very quickly or your super abilities either. However what you are able to now use highly limits strategies. Harder difficulties are going to be nightmares and will result in a lot of people getting upset.

There are of course ways around that, and it would make tons of sense for the new class abilities to allow you to make up for having to get closer. Except they don’t. The new Titan barriers aren’t a full sphere, and they don’t allow your bullets or abilities to go through. I can get why having just one or the other occurring making sense from a balancing point of view, but both? No having both occur is just nightmarish. So not only can you kill yourself by shooting a rocket, and having a barrier get set up right in front of you as you fire killing you instantly, but you still aren’t fully protected from enemies that will surround and swarm you in higher difficulties. The Warlock pools of healing and power are better, and might make a lot of difference, but the cooldown on them is going to require you to rotate multiple warlocks using them one after another to protect your team, that sounds like a balancing nightmare for Developers and making a lot players play Warlocks if they want to experience Raids or the like. Finally Hunter’s dodge ability has a much too long cooldown for such small window of invulnerability. I ‘d rather see them removing the invulnerability from it and giving the dodge ability a cooldown of 3 seconds, instead of the 30+ I experienced in the Beta. Will any of these issues be fixed prior to the full release of the game? I doubt it, given Bungie’s lack of forethought and planning in terms of fight mechanics in the past, I’m probably going to be severely disappointed by Destiny 2.

Hey all I’m back with another post about Destiny 2 since the Gameplay Trailer was released last month. I’m covering What We Know About Destiny 2!

What we don’t know: If we are keeping cosmetic stuff like Ghost Shells, Ships, Emblems, and other Vanity items. Frankly I would want to know if we get to keep this stuff, since it would affect whether I, and I’m going to bet a huge number of other people, will both playing Destiny 1 any more. I haven’t played since a couple days after Rise of Iron was released, because frankly I knew Destiny 2 was going to get rid of all of our stuff for the most part. Why bother playing for gear that won’t even be around for even cosmetic value sake? I wouldn’t have even bothered with Rise of Iron if I wasn’t given the review code and the biggest Destiny “expert” at GiN. Whether all the Subclasses will transfer to Destiny 2 is also unknown at this time. My guess is we’ll be losing Defender Titans, Bladedancer Hunters, and Sunsinger Warlocks. All three had imbalanced Supers, although being able to skip jumping puzzles via blade dancing isn’t really that imbalanced Bungie…

What we do know: We know that you’ll be able to land in multiple spots on each planet and go to a new activity straight from the surface without going to Orbit (thank god), that there are four planets we can visit in Destiny 2, and that we’ll be keeping a couple of older Subclasses in the form of Striker Titans and Gunslinger Hunters. We also know about three new subclasses. The Arcstrider Hunter, which I’ll admit looks awesome with the new Arc Staff Super. The Sentinel Titan, a purple version of Captain America’s Shield being the Super for this subclass, and the Dawnblade Warlock, which has a giant flaming sword that can fire fiery sword beams at enemies from a distance.

The four planets are Earth in the European Dead Zone, Io, Titan and Nessus. We also know there will be lots of cinematics. Whether they’ll be able to give a decent story this time remains to be seen, but I’m not holding much hope at this point. Of final note is the fact that we are losing the ability to hold both a sniper rifle and heavy weapon at the same time. Frankly this seems to be a PvP driven decision, something I’ve always said is a bad idea in a PvE centric game. Frankly Bungie lacks the balls to actually seperate gameplay between PvP and PvE, and this looks like it’ll cause PvE content to become even more of a duck and hide fest. That’s a real shame considering that the gunplay with high movement was what made Destiny so fun.

This week for Video Game Tuesday I’m going to cover the topic you all knew I would eventually. It’s all about Destiny 2!

Destiny 2: It was announced on March 30th that Destiny 2 was a real thing and would be released this year, but there were some big “surprises” announced. It would release on the PC and everything, or close to everything, wouldn’t transfer from the first game and it’s “expansions”.

PC?!?: Yea color me not that surprised, it was rumored for months prior to the announcement that it would release on PC, so I’m really not that surprised. It was a surprise it didn’t release on the PC in the first place to be honest. And just to clarify I probably won’t be playing it on PC as my main platform if I should happen to receive codes for both PC and PS4.

Wait our stuff?: Yea all that time you spent on gearing up your characters, getting cool things like Exotics, fancy looking ships, awesome Shaders, and cool Emblems was wasted. The only confirmed thing that will transfer over is the appearance of your characters, but that’s hardly a thing to be excited about. It’s not like we were ever all that attached to our characters since Destiny never had much of a story. I’d hope at least cosmetic stuff like Shaders, Emblems, Ghost Shells, Sparrows and Shaders would transfer over, but that isn’t confirmed and probably won’t happen.

My Hopes?: I hope the game transfers over the cosmetic stuff, has a story that isn’t a piece of crap, and has a loot system that doesn’t exploit players. My expectations that any of those will be met is very low, and all of them being met? Practically non-existent. I hope Bungie can redeem themselves, but I highly doubt that is possible at this point.

This week for Video Game Tuesday I’m continuing last week’s theme of customization. It’s all about Transmog Systems!

Transmog Systems?: Transmog, or Transmogrification is a term used in World of Warcraft that was introduced in Patch 4.3. It was a system that allowed the player to change the appearance of their armor to match other armor that they owned. It wasn’t the first of it’s kind, but it’s the one that gets pointed at the most in my experience. There might be other names in other games, in Final Fantasy XIV for example it’s called the Glamour System, but it’s pretty much the same thing.

What’s your favorite one?: Personally I’m a fan of Final Fantasy XIV’s system although World of Warcraft has the advantage of a library system to go with Transmog. Final Fantasy XIV’s is much less rigid, and allows you to modify almost any item to look like most others. Many items aren’t restricted by class, but there are some like the Artifact gear. I’d love to see a library system added to Final Fantasy XIV, but I know that doing so takes a lot of time to create and given that Final Fantasy XIV has a dye option as well, it’d be very hard to implement. However in FFXIV unlike WoW, you can wear ridiculous outfits into battle, do you want to be dressed up in a metallic gold pig suit as you run into battle swinging a big axe? Go ahead, that’s completely ok. WoW doesn’t allow for that which is a pity.

What games would you like to see a glamour system in?: Destiny for one would be a great place, but given how small of a pool of options that game has it’s probably not going to happen soon, although who knows with Destiny 2 supposedly coming out this year.

That’s it for this week’s Video Game Tuesday, what is your favorite transmog system? What games do you wish had transmog? Leave your thoughts in the comments below!

This week for Video Game Tuesday I’m covering a topic that is a bit contentious. It’s Character Customization!

Character Customization?: Yes, the ability to change your player character’s appearance either during creation or later in the game. To make yourself look unique, or like a famous person, or yourself, or just plain ridiculous.

Give me examples of good customization!: Well there’s always MMOs, with more recent ones getting some pretty awesome character creation abilities. Final Fantasy XIV has a fairly large character customization feature, and you can even go back and change some of it later on. Other games like the Elder Scrolls games have always had a pretty good customization ability.

Some bad examples?: Earlier MMOs had some okay character creation screens, but they limited a lot of options. For example, World of Warcraft had an okay system, but frankly every race choice was limited to a single height, no options to change height were available. They said it was due to PvP limitations, but frankly I don’t know if that’s an okay response in todays market. I’m leaning towards no, but I’m not certain on that. It was certainly useful to be able to call out “Kill Undead Mage” in flag room in Warsong Gulch for example. No one would get confused about not killing the giant Tauren Warrior instead of that smaller and skinnier Undead Mage. An example of a bad single player character customization are examples like Sword Art Online Lost Song, which had such a terrible character customization system that it might as well have been removed to allow for something more useful.

Variety: I personally think having a great variety of options is always great, but some people find it overwhelming, while others love spending hours upon hours making the “perfect” character for themselves. Personally I’ll spend a bit of time on it, but if it gets past the 15 minute mark, I’ll start to hurry it up.

That’s it for this week’s Video Game Tuesday! What are some of your favorite character customization in games? How long do you typically spend in character customization? Leave your thoughts in the comments below!

I’m back with a look at the failures from this past year for this week’s Video Game Tuesday. It’s my Losers of 2016!

PC Gaming: Before you PC Elitists get all up in arms, calm down. I’m merely stating the fact that too many games launched with poor PC versions out there. That’s what sucked for you guys.

No Man’s Sky: It had such promise, and failed to deliver on a bunch of features that were mentioned leading up to the launch. Where the hell is multiplayer anyway?

Destiny: We didn’t get Destiny 2, instead we got a piece of crap called Rise of Iron. I played it for less than a week, because I couldn’t be bothered to continue playing the game when reports were saying that Destiny 2 will wipe all our characters and everything. Plus the game was just lackluster in general, it added only a new raid, a few new enemies, strikes and some boring as hell story missions. The only bright side is that they’ve brought back the Gjallarhorn and Icebreaker, but the latter is locked behind a turned in bounty RNG. Not that RNG being horrible in Destiny is anything new. Destiny 2 really needs to fix everything with the game before I’ll continue to bother spending any more time than is needed to knock out a review. Taken King was a step in the right direction, while Rise of Iron was four steps back.

Mighty No. 9: From the creator of Mega Man, this had great promise. It turned out to be a pile of trash instead, and frankly I feel bad for any who gave money to the Kickstarter.

Star Fox Zero: Nintendo hasn’t been doing so hot in the last decade, which is a pity because leading up to the launch of the Wii, Nintendo had some of the best games on consoles. Star Fox Zero is merely another notch on the failure boat that is Nintendo. I want to care about your games, but if you can’t play games without gimmicky controls, or sub-par graphics and hardware I’m not ever going to be interested.